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Friday, January 14, 2011

Tannhauser for Beginners, Day Three…

After the jump, we’re going to pick up right where we left off in our little Three on Three Deathmatch, and we’ll try to cover as many uses of Command Points as possible. Also we’ll look at Grenades.

First let’s look at how things were when we finished yesterday.

As you can see, we’re right in the middle of turn two, John and the Stoss have activated and both are wounded, John sits on Death’s doorstep, and the Stoss is one row down, and has used his remaining move points hence his new location. Also the Union has no CP left while the Reich have 1, it the Union’s turn to move.

The Union Player choses to Activate his Commando Alpha, standing in the hall along the left of the map. He has a DV of 7 and choses to move up the hall 4 spaces, and for his Action he going to use the “Throw Grenade” Action. Now Grenades are something a little different and the rules are detailed on page 22 and 23.

Now a Grenade, has the Trait “Grenade”, and has a range of 5, meaning they can be “tossed” up to five circles away from your character’s position. And one more neat thing about Grenades is they can go one circle out of Path. That means the last circle doesn’t have to have a color that matches any of the colors your character is standing in, so let go to the close up.

Now you can see that the Commando Alpha (Alpha) has moved up and tossed his grenade and it’s “bounced” one circle out of path, to land at Karl’s feet. This brings us to what a grenade does once it lands, well the first thing you should do is place a Rubble token (because this is easy to forget). (See Below)

The next thing you do is make a Shock roll for each character (friend or foe) Adjacent to where the Grenade landed. Which in this case is Karl and the Schocktruppen. A Grenade does not require an Attack roll as it deals FOUR Automatic Successes (hit) to all adjacent to it. So let’s look at the dice now, in close up.

In this case because there is no Attack roll the light colored dice are for Karl’s Shock roll and the black ones are the Schocktruppen’s Shock roll. Well it’s pretty clear the Schocktruppen roll of 1, 2, 3, 7, is not good. His Stamina Value is 5 so he’s only canceled one of those Automatic hits. And well since he’s a Trooper with only three health rows he’s dead.

Now how about Karl, he rolled a much better 10, 6, 5, 1, so he suffers only one wound, which the Reich player may spend a CP to “Shake Off”.

So this is how the board looks after that Grenade, you can see that the Schocktruppen figure has been removed from the board, and his Disposable Equipment tokens have been placed on the board where he stood. Note: Disposable Tokens are the ones with the black and yellow hashes around them. Also now no one has any Command Points left. Next it’s back to the Union to see if the Alpha wants to use his remaining move points, and he back pedals three circles to a relatively safer location.

Now on to the Reich’s turn. since the Stoss had already Activated this Game Turn and the Schocktruppen is now painting the walls. They only have Karl left to activate. Karl does have a couple options one he could use his demonically cursed gun called “Doom” or he has a grenade of his own, or he could do something else entirely.

Well the Reich player decides he’ll go to use Doom, now if you look one page 40 you’ll see Doom has a special range of Karl’s Mental Value plus one, so if you look at Karl’s stats you’ll see his MV is 5, that gives Doom a range of 6, also note the target can be out of Path, so he need not share a color with his target.

Karl choses to fire Doom at John, who is only five circles away. Let’s go to the close up.

Again the light dice are for the Union and the black dice are for the Reich. So, looking at Doom’s traits we see it’s a “Weapon, Mental…” this means it rolls only four dice for it Attack, and Karl rolls 10, 8, 7, 3 scoring three hits. Unfortunately for John his wounds mean his current Stamina Value is 4 so he need a 6 (remember 10-4=6) to cancel a hit, and the roll is 7, 4, 3, 2, he only canceled one and as he was only one hit point from death he is eliminated.

So now Karl having acted, may still move, remember you always get a move and an action, and that ends the Reich turn and now it’s time for the Union’s final move this Game Turn.

The Union has only the Commando Delta (Delta) left to activate, and he can be seen above on the left side of the picture. He choses to move only one circle to the right leaving him with six more move points to use later. Then for his Action he fires his “S&W 1917”, at the already wounded Stoss. On to the close up.

The Delta got lucky, his gun has the Pistol trait and therefore only rolls four dice. As you can see he got 10, 8, 8, 7, with his CV of 5 he hit with all four. Of course with numbers like those he would have to have a Combat Value of two to miss even once. Now, the Stoss is wounded, but if you look on page 45 you’ll see his “Immunity to Pain” item means he uses his best Stamina Value, no matter where the Health Indicator is pointing; similar to Supernatural Strength, only for Stamina instead of Combat. But even so his roll of 10, 5, 3, 2, only cancels two hits and combined with his previous wounds he too is eliminated.

The Union player uses the Delta’s remaining 6 move points to move away from Karl and closer to the Alpha. And that brings to a close turn Two. Before we move on let’s take a look at the board.

As we can see it has not gone well for the Reich.

On to turn three, first we reset the Command Points to TWO for each player, then we make the Initiative roll…

Wow, a tie, in this case both players reroll their die. The next die roll is below and you can see the Reich Player finally has Initiative.

But the Union player is pretty used to going first, so he spend a Command Point to reroll his die. Now if he beats the Reich’s 8 he will win Initiative and the Reich can’t do anything about it.

Well that’s a wasted CP, the Union player doesn’t get it back even though his die roll was worse.

The Reich player has only Karl left in play, so Karl activates, and move four circle towards the map’s center. He then takes his action and uses Doom to Attack the Commando Delta.

Now on the close up some of you who have read through the book are saying yeah Delta got a Natural 10. And Natural 10s are something we haven’t discussed yet because no one with a Nat. 10 ability has rolled one.

But what is a Natural 10?

A Natural 10 is when you get a “0” on a die, and it means two things; first it’s always a Success (hit), and second it can activate Special Abilities. Delta has a item called the “BG-42” which cancel all an enemy’s hits if he rolls a Natural 10, but it only works against weapons with the “Pistol” or “Automatic” Traits, see page 54.

And that’s the catch remember Doom doesn’t have either of those Traits so, the BG-42 does not activate.

But in the end it doesn’t matter because both Karl and Delta got three hits, and really nothing happened. Remember that even though Karl is wounded his CV is still 4 and 10-4=6 so a 6 or more is a hit.

So now another common situation develops, the Reich having only one character left has no more Activations this turn, which allows the Union to move his characters Back-to-Back.

First the Union player Activates his Alpha and uses his full DV of 7 to move into the room with Karl. The Union player wanting to finish Karl off, spends his last Command Point to increase the Alpha’s Combat Value to 6 and then use his Action to Attack Karl with his “Flash Gun MK1”. Let’s have a look.

The first thing you’ll notice is a couple extra dice to the right hand side and we’ll get to those in a second. First let’s look at page 53 you’ll see that the Flash Gun MK1 is a “Weapon, Automatic” meaning it rolls five dice for its attack, that initial roll resulted in a 10, 7, 7, 7, 6, and if you read the special rules for the Flash Gun, do include a Natural 10 ability. Which is if you roll at least one Nat. 10 you get to roll two more dice and add those to you attack. So the Union player rolls two more dice and gets a 6, 3, giving his Alpha a Total of 6 hits. Impressive huh?

Karl’s Shock roll however is no so great; the Reich player rolled 10, 8, 2, 4, canceling only TWO of the SIX hits, resulting Karl suffering FOUR Wounds, which is his maximum, but wait… The Reich player has two CP left and if you got a copy of the FAQ from the FFG web site you’ll se that a Command Point may be spent to prevent a characters death. And so the Reich player spends one CP to keep Karl alive a little longer.

As I mentioned before the Union gets to move one character right after the other. So he activates his Delta and he move two circles forward into the room with Karl. For his Action he will use his S&W 1917 to Attack Karl again.

In the close up you’ll see, that the Reich player didn’t have to make Shock roll because the Delta didn’t hit anything.

The Reich player decides to spend his final Command Point to Counter Attack. If you look on page 25 you’ll find the rules for Counter Attacks, the main rules to remember are these: you must do this immediately after being Attacked, it costs one CP, and you have to use your worst Combat Value. If we look at Karl’s Character Sheet his worst CV is 4 which in Karl’s current condition is also his Current Combat Value.

In the image above you can see that Karl rolled a 10, 6, 6, 3, a good three hits, which is good for any attack, especially a Counter Attack.

The Delta on the other hand has only a 9, 5, 3, 2, and cancels only two of the three hits, and receives one Wound, the Union Player has no Command Point to “Shake Off” that wound.

And that is the end of Turn Three.

Now since this is a Deathmatch, the game would probably continue another turn until Karl finally died, or by some amazing stroke of luck the Reich player kills the two Commandos.

But for us this is the end, I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you learned a little more about how Tannhauser is played.

That’s the end of this basic intro to Tannhauser, hopefully you all have a better understanding of what Tannhauser is, how it’s played, and how characters move and fight.